Academisation and teachers’ dilemmas

Abstract

In 2010, the Swedish Education Act introduced new provisions stating that education at all levels should ‘rest on scientific grounds and proven experience’. These requirements led to greater policy activities at the state level and enhanced the cooperation emerging between the municipality and higher education as well as between teachers and researchers at both the middle and micro levels. This study was conducted in a Swedish municipality that adopted a local strategy to meet the Education Act’s scientific requirements for teaching. As part of this strategy, together with a university the municipality designed a postgraduate programme, corresponding to a one-year master’s level under the Bologna Agreement, made up of four years of part-time studies and with a focus on practical research and school development. This article examines how a sample of 15 teachers participating in this postgraduate programme, and their school leaders, perceive this policy (namely, education being based on scientific grounds) within the development of the teaching profession’s practice and which dilemmas they face while trying to interpret and handle the Education Act’s provisions in their schools. Our overall theoretical perspectives are those of policy enactment, academic drift and activity theory. The results indicate that the teachers’ participation in the postgraduate course has caused tension among their colleagues. Moreover, the teachers expressed a feeling of being ‘isolated cogs’ in an organisation and lacking supporting structures. For some, their participation is a step in a more individualised project that contributes primarily to their own professional development; for others, it is more of a collective project with which one can ‘lift’ one’s school and colleagues.